We’ve told you about The Atlantic’s By Heart series a few times before. Now, here’s a compendium of some of the series’ best advice on writing collected from the past year.
Writing By Heart
Rediscoveries
It’s been forty years since a burst of new critical attention gave Anthony Trollope a new life. What is it about him that makes his work enduringly relevant? In the latest New Yorker, Adam Gopnik argues that the author was a master of gossip. You could also read Sara Henary on the author’s two hundredth birthday.
Remembering Denis Johnson
“He believed it a privilege and a shame that his race and nationality gave him the chance to come and go from lands where a guillotine blade seemed to dangle forever over the local citizens.” Denis Johnson‘s longtime Esquire editor Will Blythe pens a remembrance of the writer for The New York Times. See also: our own Sonya Chung‘s recommendation of Johnson’s celebrated short story collection Jesus’ Son to a friend some years back. “I know it will knock him out,” she wrote. “It does (of course).”
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More On Hitchens
In tribute to the passing of Christopher Hitchens, The Browser has collected some of his essays. His final memoir will be released in the states in April of next year.
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Take a Look at Cormac McCarthy’s Screenplay
The New Yorker has a sneak peek at some scenes Cormac McCarthy wrote for the forthcoming Ridley Scott film, The Counsellor.
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All Hail King Brody
Damian Lewis is going from being a traitor of a country to running one. He will star as Henry VIII in the BBC’s adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Mark Rylance will play Thomas Cromwell (though previously he’s played another role in the court, Sir Thomas Boleyn.)
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